On Sunday, the world watched as U.S. forces pulled out of a rapidly deteriorating Afghanistan, with images of people desperately trying to scale American fighter planes recalling footage from Saigon as it fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. It brought to a cataclysmic end a 20-year ordeal, which experts have said could never have ended well, and which could have gone even worse. Fingers have been pointing everywhere, including, one pundit argues, by the president himself.
On Monday afternoon, as per The Daily Beast, Biden formally addressed the situation in the South Asian nation, standing by his decision to pull out, and arguing that the blame lies all over — with Democrats and Republicans alike. But he also singled out Afghan officials. “The political leaders of Afghanistan were unable to come together for the good of their people,” Biden said, noting that Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the nation before U.S. forces left. He also noted that the Afghan military were unable to hold back Taliban fighters. “Mr. Ghani insisted the Afghan forces would fight, but obviously he was wrong.”
Biden argued that the U.S. simply could no longer pour money into a permanently febrile situation. “I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past,” Biden said. “The events we see now are sadly proof that no amount of military force would ever deliver a stable, united, secure, Afghanistan.”
But CNN’s Jake Tapper was not impressed with Biden’s speech. “The president said that the buck stopped with him,” he said after the speech. “But in fact the speech was full of finger-pointing and blame, especially for the Afghans.”
Tapper laid out some of the president’s points about dealing with a perhaps impossibly febrile situation. Among Biden’s claims were that some of the Afghan allies, such as translators, didn’t leave earlier because they were hopefuly for a new Afghan government. If there had been a mass exodus, Biden said, there were fears that would have caused a crisis of confidence — ahead of the crisis that’s happening right now.
But Tapper took umbrage with Biden claiming to take responsibility without actually taking responsibility. “He did not really go into or accept any blame for the catastrophic exit we have been watching on television for the last several days,” Tapper said.
And so Biden faces what may be the first major setback of his still young presidency, albeit one that could never have ended well and which had simply been prolonged by his predecessors — including, partially, him when he was only the vice president.
(Via The Daily Beast)